The Virgin and Child with St. Anne
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
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| The Virgin and Child with St. Anne |
| Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1508 |
| oil on wood, 168 × 112 cm |
| Musée du Louvre |
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is an oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting St. Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. It was commissioned as the high altarpiece for the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence and its theme had long preoccupied Leonardo.
In 1498, Leonardo probed into incorporating the three figures together by drawing the Burlington House Cartoon (National Gallery, London), which included all three figures in addition to an infant St. John. the Baptist. An earlier cartoon is known to have been exhibited in Santissima Annunziata in 1501 but is now lost. Neither cartoon would never materialize into a painting, but the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne would emerge.
Leonardo painted The Virgin and Child with St. Anne during the later years of his life when he was occupied with an interest in mathematics and other pursuits, its rocky landscape betraying his interest in geology. The demands of his other interests may have forced him to leave this painting incomplete.
The painting's pyramidal structure influenced Raphael and Andrea del Sarto. Its composition inspired two High Renaissance sculptures, one by Andrea Sansovino (S. Agostino, Rome) and another, less successful work by Francesco da Sangallo (Orsanmichele, Florence).
Freud's interpretation
Sigmund Freud undertook a psychoanalytic examination of Leonardo in his essay Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. According to Freud, the Virgin's garment reveals a vulture when viewed sideways. Freud claims this is a manifestation of a "passive homosexual" childhood fantasy that Leonardo wrote about in the Codex Atlanticus, in which he recounts being attacked as an infant in his crib by the tail of a vulture. Freud translated the passage thus:
- It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures— for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.
According to Freud, this fantasy was based on the memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He backed up his claim with the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs represent the mother as a vulture, because the Egyptians believed that there are no male vultures and that the females of the species are impregnated by the wind.
Unfortunately for Freud, the word 'vulture' was a mistranslation by the German translator of the Codex and the bird that Leonardo imagined was in fact a kite. This disappointed Freud because, as he confessed to Lou Andréas Salomé, he regarded Leonardo as 'the only beautiful thing I have ever written'. Other Freudian scholars have however made attempts to repair the theory by incorporating the kite.
Sources
Freud, The Writer of Leonardo (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/Greenw.html|)sk:Svätá rodina so svätou Annou
